Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

Originally Posted by Heliode

Does .bz2 give you that much better compression? If so I'll have to change that. Thanks for the tip. By the way though; does it really matter what kind of extension you give the file? I thought that was a Windows CrazyThing too

Bzip2 compresses quite a bit more than gzip or zip, but it's also quite a bit slower. The extension is handy to let users know how to expand the archive. For gzip'd files you use gunzip, but for bzip2'd files you have to use bunzip2. I guess if the archives were never going to be used by anybody else it wouldn't matter how you named them.

Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

Originally Posted by jonrkc

Bzip2 compresses quite a bit more than gzip or zip, but it's also quite a bit slower. The extension is handy to let users know how to expand the archive. For gzip'd files you use gunzip, but for bzip2'd files you have to use bunzip2. I guess if the archives were never going to be used by anybody else it wouldn't matter how you named them.

Ok, i'll add it to the howto as an alternative. I suppose you just substitude the z with a j in the extract command as well?

Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

I do regular backups of my system using a knoppix cd and running partimage from that. In my experience partimage does the same as ghost or acronis true image, works just as well, and is FOSS! Partimage can be installed in ubuntu using apt-get.

Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

A very good friend of mine warned me not to exclude /dev. He says the device nodes are not automatically regenerated. As i've personally never tried excluding /dev I don't think its save to include it in this guide, so I removed it again.

People who have already used this approach please take caution! To be sure you'll have to recreate your backup, this time including /dev !

Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

Well, if you want to run this weekly, I suggest a somewhat different approach:
1: Create one backup of the whole system once, excluding the /home dir, and burn it to cd/store it on another PC

2: Create weekly backups of the /home dir only, which you overwrite every time.

That way, if your computer goes up in flames, you just restore the first backup followed by the second backup. If some program screwed something up, or you've been hacked, restore only the first one and have your system in the same state as when it was 'clean', but keep your home dir.
In another case; if something happens to your home dir (you accidently delete stuff, you lose a config file that is stored in your home dir, etc) you restore just the second kind of backup.

This has several advantages, some of which;
-when something goes wrong, you don't have to restore *everything*, and
-you don't have to wait for your whole system to be backed-up every week, only your home-dir.
-you have a way to restore your system to the state it was in when you first installed it, but keep your home directory.

You can create weekly backups by putting the backup command in 'cron.weekly', but I have no experience in manual cron configuration. Maybe someone else can help you with that.

Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

Great HowTo, I like how you need absolutely no extra software to do it.

Apparently you can use a (free) program called mondo rescue which backs up onto bootable media. I have installed it but haven't tested it yet.

Yes, mondo is very good, it can create bootable CDs/DVDs of your system very easily. Mondo would be what I suggest for an initial backup of a clean system that is configured the way one wants it. That way if your system gets trashed, boot off the CD/DVD and restore, and you good to go again... but like ghost it will wipe all info. Also its in the repository.

Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

Originally Posted by jeremy

I do regular backups of my system using a knoppix cd and running partimage from that. In my experience partimage does the same as ghost or acronis true image, works just as well, and is FOSS! Partimage can be installed in ubuntu using apt-get.

I will have to give the partimage method a try. I obtained it via rpm package for Mandriva, before I switched a few days ago to Ubuntu, which I'm already liking a good deal better for several reasons. (I have nothing at all against Mandriva and am glad I was able to get started with Linux in Jan. 2003 using Mandrake.)

I have a live Ubuntu disc and if I ever succeed in understanding partimage well enough (it kind of intimidates me...) I'll at least give it a try.

Some very good suggestions in this thread for a task that should be among the most simple and basic, and yet can cause real frustration for Linux users: simply backing up a system.

Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

Partimage is really quite easy to use, somewhat similar to ghost. As far as I know it isn't on the ubuntu live cd, which is why I use knoppix.
You should start partimage from a root console, and the partition that you are imaging should not be mounted. I make my images on a 2nd HD, then burn to dvd from ubuntu.